Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 - 19 April 1883) was a famous naturalist born in England. He is best known for the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection which has since been almost universally accepted by secular scientists as the foundation of modern biology. The concept is that organisms are modified over vast amounts of time by naturally occurring processes, originating from common ancestors that lived tens of millions of years ago. Outside of evolution in particular, he was regarded as an expert on barnacles, as well as being credited with discovering how coral atolls were formed.

General Biography

Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England in 1809 to his parents Dr. Robert Darwin and Susannah Wedgewood. Darwin's mother was a religious woman but his father was, for the most part, a weak deist. Despite his lack of theistic religious belief, Darwin's father allowed Charles to be baptized into the Anglican Church and encouraged him to become a clergyman. Darwin's mother died in 1817. In 1825 he went on to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. There, he became horrified with the brutality of surgery before anesthesia was invented and quit his medical studies. In 1831 he graduated from Christ's College at Cambridge with a BA degree in the classics and theology. On December 27 of the same year he departed on the HMS Beagle for a five year voyage of exploration. The Beagle returned to English shores on October 2 1836. In 1837, Darwin drew his now famous depiction of common ancestry in the form of a branching tree . The following year he discovered the concept of natural selection. Darwin insists that naturally occurring phenomena and factors working together in blind tandem have prodcued nature and eventually mankind. However, he originally based the idea of human evolution on a racist assumption, [after God was rejected as Creator], made in the late 1830s, that Fuegians (natives of Tierra del Fuego) resembled primates that he had observed in the London zoo. In 1842 he wrote out a sketch of his theory but did not publish it. Again, in 1844 he produced what is known today as an essay of the same theory more developed but he still chose not to publish. Finally, in 1859, Darwin publishes his famous theory about how life may have been produced without any aid from a Divine Creator, he titles his book: On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life. In 1871, well after his theory enjoyed widespread success, Darwin published his ideas on human evolution in a two volume book titled Descent of Man.

Religious Views

Charles Darwin in 1880 at the age of 71.

Charles Darwin likely abandoned Christianity as a student when he disappointed his father by refusing to become a minister. In his autobiography Darwin wrote about the diminishment of his religious faith and Darwin also stated he was an agnostic. Darwin wrote the following: "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic." However, in the 1996 British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Kim Sterelny wrote in a book review the following: "I have no doubt that Darwin was a materialist and a mechanist..." Creation Ministries International provides some illumination regarding why it is maintained that Darwin was privately a materialist/atheist:

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Ernst Mayr’s recent book on Darwin, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Evolutionary Thought, Harvard, 1991, also acknowledges that Darwin’s references to purpose were to appease both the public and his wife. His early, private notebooks show his materialism well established. For instance, in one of them he addresses himself as, ‘O, you materialist!’ and says, ‘Why is thought, being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity as a property of matter?’ He clearly already believed that the idea of a separate realm of the spirit was nonsense, as is further shown when he warns himself not to reveal his beliefs, as follows: ‘to avoid saying how far I believe in materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talent which are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock.’

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Scholars refer to the private notebook in which Darwin stated he was a materialist as the "M" notebook of 1838.

According to Darwin the "manifestly false history of the world" as recorded in the Old Testament and New Testament miracles led him to reject Biblical veracity . Eminent Darwin biographer, Professor Janet Browne, sums up Darwin's views concerning religion: Darwin "mapped out a comparative evolution of the religious sense, proposing that religious belief was ultimately nothing more than a primitive urge to bestow a cause on otherwise inexplicable natural events...In short, he made no secret of his view that he did not believe religion to have any rational foundation at all" . When he died in 1882 at the age of seventy-three, Darwin was buried at Westminster Abbey next to Sir Isaac Newton.

However, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the following:

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In 1885, the Duke of Argyll recounted a conversation he had had with Charles Darwin the year before Darwin's death: In the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his own remarkable works on the Fertilisation of Orchids, and upon The Earthworms, and various other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature—I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of Mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin's answer. He looked at me very hard and said, “Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,” and he shook his head vaguely, adding, “it seems to go away.”(Argyll 1885, 244]

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There exists in hostile Darwin literature a story about a Christian called Lady Hope who visited and spoke with a dying Charles Darwin. This appears to be merely a legend, and there is no evidence that Lady Hope ever converted or even visited Darwin on his deathbed.

Darwin's Sickness and Controversy Regarding His Sickness

For more on this topic see: Darwin's Sickness

For most of his adult life Darwin suffered from very poor health. The 1992 New Encyclopaedia Britannica stated that Darwin's illness was psychogenic in origin (A psychogenic illness is one that originates in the mind or in mental condition). A 1997 journal article states that the "variable intensity of symptoms and chronic, prolonged course without physical deterioration also indicate that his illness was psychiatric." In regards to illness associated with evolutionary ideas a journal article in the American Journal of Medicine states that Darwin suffered from "psychoneurosis provoked and exaggerated by his evolutionary ideas". The American Journal of Medicine article also stated that his Darwin's wife, Emma, greatly disapproved of his evolutionist ideas and "This, facismile of public reaction, must have kept lively his anxiety and torment". According to the abstract for a 1997 journal article in the Notes and Records of the Royal Society the psychogenic hypothesis for the origin of Darwin's illness "holds the field" but the article questions the validity of this diagnoses and mentions the work of Ralph Colp Jr. MD, a physician and psychiatrist (For details see: Darwin's sickness).

Given Darwin's likely psychomatic or psychobiological illness various creationists have stated that Darwin's illness was the result of guilt and/or fear.

Darwin's Reaction to Criticism of His Work

Darwin closely followed society's reaction to his evolutionary ideas. In 2002, Richard Milner wrote an article entitled "Putting Darwin in his Place" and stated that Darwin "clipped, catalogued and indexed hundreds of offprints, about 350 reviews and 1,600 articles, as well as satires, parodies and Punch caricatures, with which he filled hefty scrapbooks..." Criticisms of his work troubled Darwin. Milner wrote that after Charles Lyell published a weak endorsement of Darwin's work in Lyell's Antiquity of Man, "Darwin's disappointment brought on 10 days of vomiting, faintness and stomach distress". In addition, Milner states when anatomist St. George Mivart made a negative review of Darwin's work The Descent of Man, it "triggered two months of "giddiness" and inability to work..."